Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Not All Slave Owners Were Rapine Beasts: Ron Paul's Musings on States' Rights and the "Tragedy" of the Civil War

Over the last few days, I have watched this interview with Ron Paul several times. Something about his tone of voice just doesn't sit right with me, the detached indifference rubs me the wrong way.

It is easy to flatten history, in doing so to generate stories of evil men, barbarous and incomprehensible deeds, and frothing at the mouth villains. This is true when the history is personal and your people would have been the vanquished, the oppressed, the conquered, or the exiled. Ironically, the need to hold on to a fiction of two-dimensional monsters and evildoers is also true of those who are the present day descendants of the dominant, the winners, the exploiters, the "in-group," and the conquerors.

By painting "those people" into a box where only the most wicked were racist, prejudiced, genocidal, chauvinist or the like, a safe distance is created between the present and the past. Cartoon versions of the past are very comforting for those on both sides of history's accounting sheet: nuance is a shared enemy for those seeking simple and validating stories.

For example, it is easy to imagine all white slave owners as rapine beasts who crawled into the beds of black women and girls, using them as their personal sex toys, where inevitably these same white men would either sell off their own mulatto sires for a profit, or throw them into the fields as "free" labor. Likewise, we can envision the babies of newly arrived African slaves being smashed on the ground, killed during the seasoning process that the human cargo of the slave ships endured upon arrival in the New World.

In black masculinity's shared collective memory there exist memories of wives and loved ones taken before our eyes, we being rendered powerless to intervene by the barrel of the gun or the edge of the blade, and where inevitably the lustful eyes of the white slave owner, his sons, and friends turn to us as objects to sate the wickedness of their reckless and violent libidos. This is a secret pain, one little discussed in the shared history of blacks and whites together in the Americas and elsewhere. And of course, every overseer was an evil debased man like Mr. Covey of Frederick Douglass' famed autobiography, a degenerate piece of poor white trash who, like many of his class, lived for nothing but the sadistic pleasures that came with "breaking" black slaves as he made them suffer under his whip, ax handle, cat of nine tales, scold's bridle, or branding iron.

But, what of the white slave owner who struggled to reconcile his "Christian faith" with the owning of human beings, and in a fit of guilt, convinced that he would go to hell because of his wickedness, freed his human property? How do we make sense of the white slave owner who manumitted the children of slaves on his plantation, or the feelings of loyalty and closeness that some slaves felt for their "white family?"

Perhaps, most troubling for a two dimensional version of American (and Atlantic) slavery is that plantations were run like factories. Of course, there were yeoman whites who owned one or two slaves, and lived in close intimacy with them, as privations were shared, and struggles (if not successes) were experienced in common across the colorline. But the plantations that occupy American memory, The Gone with the Wind version of history, were in reality, based on detached principles of labor efficiency. The owners of these business enterprises exchanged journals, notes, and theories about how to improve the yield of their crops. Therein, rubrics about the relationship between the ideal amount of punishment (the whip) and selective incentives in order to produce the maximum amount of productivity were divined and ciphered.

For the most profitable slave-owning whites, chattel slavery was a business. In many instances, it was a very impersonal one (where on some plantations the owner would never dispense punishment personally as it was a distasteful act and would make his slaves resent and fear him, while on other plantations it was only the head of the house who could wield the whip or the lash--overseers were not to be trusted to act judiciously or fairly). In all, African American bondsmen and bondswomen were entries on a ledger sheet; they were "workers" whose productivity had to be maximized by any means available.

There is an odd intimacy here. On one hand, slavery on the largest plantations was business and never personal. As a practical matter, slavery could never be anything but the latter.

It is not Ron Paul's piss poor understanding of the historical underpinnings of the Civil War and chattel slavery that is most disturbing. No, it is the idea that in his detached musings, I can hear in my ear the whisper of the assassin doing a hit, or a slave owner assessing the value of his latest purchase on the auction block, that this is "business, never personal," just before they pull the trigger or sign the check.

As we have seen in other moments throughout his campaign, there is an utter lack of human empathy (and sympathy) for black personhood in Paul's speech to his Redemptionist, white racist, Neo-Secessionist public that yearns for the states' rights narrative. This is the root of my disturbance.

Ron Paul's counter-factual about gradual or compensated manumission (where the freedom of blacks held in bondage was purchased as a means to end chattel slavery) is problematic on a number of levels. Primarily, it ignores the significant psychic wage that whites invested in the personal owning of black bodies, their attachment to a society that validated white superiority over people of color, and where even though a majority of whites did not have bloody hands from the direct business of chattel slavery, they could aspire to one day own slaves as a sign of upward mobility and success.

Ron Paul's musings about the civil war as an avoidable conflict, save for the desire of the North to impose its will on the poor South--and thus violating states' rights--is also ahistorical. We do not need to hypothesize about why such proposals as compensated manumission did not come to pass on a wide scale in the United States. It is not a mystery or puzzle. There is a rich historical record which details the many failings of such a scheme, and slave owners' rejections of it in the name of perpetual white supremacy.

In all, Ron Paul's desire to frame the Civil War as a tragedy for the South at the hands of a villainous North, a federal force that only wanted to take away the liberties of white people, is an ideal-typical example of libertarianism's failings on matters of race and justice. Ron Paul does not seem to identify slavery--the owning of black people by white people in perpetuity--as a de facto state of war and tyranny. If libertarians were to find a historic freedom struggle to claim as their own, one would think that abolition, accomplished by any means necessary, would be at the top of their list.

Second, Paul places his principle of "non-interference" over the rights of African Americans (and others) to be treated as full and equal citizens. Whites have the freedom to discriminate against, violate, and terrorize black people. The latter's liberty and freedom are secondary to those of the former. By virtue of that most basic standard, Ron Paul is a polite white supremacist who enables and supports a herrenvolk Apartheid America in theory, if not fully in practice.

The detached manner in which Ron Paul valorizes the Confederacy as "the victim" of federal tyranny, is to my eyes at least, one of the most frightening faces of contemporary, "color blind" white supremacy. Here, black people are secondary to his principles; slaves do not really enter into the calculus because as a privileged white man he cannot imagine himself as existing in such a state of existential duress and oppression.

In keeping with the universal "I" of whiteness, the "normal," the race-neutral "we," the African American held in bondage is secondary to Ron Paul's higher order principles. "We the people," and "the states' rights" apparently do not include the will of African Americans to not be held as human property. Ron Paul's whiteness is blinding, deafening, and utterly transparent in this regard. It is ugly. I dare say that there is something evil about it.

I thought long about that last statement of moral and existential judgement. I own it. I believe it.

Just as the plantation owner entered profits and losses, births and deaths, crops and yields, in his ledger, we can all take comfort in the fact that Ron Paul's particular version of white racism is "business, and never personal." That makes it okay, doesn't it?

44 comments:

In black masculinity's shared collective memory there exist memories of wives and loved ones taken before our eyes, we being rendered powerless to intervene by the barrel of the gun or the edge of the blade, and where inevitably the lustful eyes of the white slave owner, his sons, and friends turn to us as objects to sate the wickedness of their reckless and violent libidos. This is a secret pain, one little discussed in the shared history of blacks and whites together in the Americas and elsewhere.

There is also a secret history of blacks, whites, and indians living together in the Americas and elsewhere free of political imperialism. Free black men in the colorado territories shot and killed crazy white folks who got out of pocket. We descendents of such free black men have no such fictionalized recollections of stuff that didn't happen to our predecessors 150 years ago. What we have instead is the indelible living memory of uncompromising men descended from free men - born close to the turn of the 20th century - who acted like they owned the joint wherever they went and protected theirs from Jim Crow and worse - and who didn't hesitate to light up fools who brought violence to their doorstep.

http://bookstore.autonomedia.org/index.php?main_page=pubs_product_book_info&cPath=13&products_id=75 North American history is full of peoples who successfully resisted state imperialism. Lost history viewed through cracks in the cartographies of control, including "tri-racial isolate" communities, buccaneers, "white Indians", black Islamic movements, the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, the Métis nation, scandalous eugenics theories, rural "hippie" communes, and many other aspects of North American autonomous cultures. A festschrift honoring late historian Hugo Leaming Bey of the Moorish Science Temple.

Outside the parochial "approved" limits of your fragmentary historical narrative and melodramatic moral appeals to the modern imagination, there is the more relevant stuff that Paul is on about in his political counternarrative. To suggest the Civil War was principally fought over liberation of black slaves is simply incorrect. Slavery would have vanished within 20 years had there been no Civil War.

Paul is correct in his historical and principled assessment. Two masters cannot be in one house. Either governments of the States are equal to the Federal government - or they are not. If they are not, then the suspension of Habeas Corpus and Posse Comitatus used by Lincoln is a continuity of Executive Branch State power as understood by the Constitution making him Commander-in-Chief. Under such an understanding he lawfully went to a total war footing - without permission of Congress - to put down an insurrection that threatened the power of the recently seated Federal government. The power of the federal government to control finances is what was at stake.

If these States left the Federal union he was threatened with losing other states or portions of those states to secession. Furthermore, there was the question of the Compromise of 1850 in play, as well. Lincoln was faced with the prospect of being the man who cost the union, or the man who lost the union, an uneviable position for a politician.

"There is also a secret history of blacks, whites, and indians living together in the Americas and elsewhere free of political imperialism. Free black men in the colorado territories shot and killed crazy white folks who got out of pocket. We descendents of such free black men..."

There is another secret history as well, that can only be understood in the context of a three tier system of racial classification. Free blacks were not always united with the struggle of the black underclass. Some, a greater percentage of them than of whites, were slave holders themselves, and they could be as cruel as any white slave owner. How do you know that you're not descended from this complicit class of free blacks and not the heroic ones?

CNU said: "Slavery would have vanished within 20 years had there been no Civil War."

Paul asserts the war was about state's rights and the federal reaction. Had there been no war and the South was allowed to secede (and assumedly retain slavery as a component of commerce), would not the outcome more probably be a social movement in the North abolishing slavery and the entrenchment of it in the South? If it was integral to business and the states expressly formed another union that protected that "right", then what possible force would have countered that?

"Libertarianism" can only be sold to people who are convinced that it is *never* going to happen and completely utterly *impossible* that their neck would ever be the one under the boot of the "free" individual actor. This is exactly why "libertarianism" is always bound up in the continuation of systems of oppression such as racism, misogyny, christianism, nativism, and the like.

@CNu"How much slaving went on again in the Colorado and Kansas territories?" Good question. The complicit freeblack slave owners would have been mostly in the established states, north and south. Likely the freeblacks in the unincorporated territories would have been, as you indicate, anti-slavery. I'm just trying to expand the "two dimensional version of American (and Atlantic) slavery" we now subscribe to. Obviously, Kansas and Colorado territorities was a flashpoint of the struggle between anti and pro slavery forces:

(wiki) Pro-slavery settlers:Within a few days after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, hundreds of Missourians crossed into the adjacent territory, selected a section of land, and then united with fellow-adventurers in a meeting or meetings, intending to establish a pro-slavery preemption upon all this region...Before the first arrival of Free-State emigrants from the northern and eastern States, nearly every desirable location along the Missouri River had been claimed by men from western Missouri, by virtue of the preemption laws.Free-Staters:During the long debate that preceded the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, it had become the settled opinion at the North that the only remaining means whereby the territory might yet be rescued from the grasp of the slave power, was in its immediate occupancy and settlement by anti-slavery emigrants from the free states in sufficient numbers to establish free institutions within its borders.

@Cnu. You love Newt and Paul. Like I said you are a professional contrarian as of late.

1. Melodramatic? No. Truth telling. You ironically proved my point about folks living in denial of the complexity of their own history. You can imagine yourself descended from a long line of super negro resistance fighters and share that stuff at the barbershop all day lone. I am for it actually. I am of the negros with guns clique in fact (did some of my family geneology and confirmed some stories), and yet I am also not ashamed of the fact that people like you and me were raped, killed, and exploited under slavery and then afterwards during debt peonage and Jim crow.

Yes, men and women.

I am also very familiar with the history of slave and free people's resistance in the New World. Nothing I offered here contradicts that.

We committed no crimes, thus I have no shame or embarrassment. Why do you?

On the Civil War and slavery you need to peddle that mess elsewhere. I will take the consensus of serious historians on the subject over your pedantic journeyman recycled musings. Sorry. Would you like a reading list on the subject?

Your point about technology and industrialization is a fallacy of the single explanatory variable being used to explain complex outcomes. For example, one of the ironies of Eli Whitney's cotton gin was that it made slavery more productive, efficient, and viable.

Slavery was also remarkably adaptable. There was in fact "industrial slavery" in the South.

FACT: We do not now own slaves or seek to own slaves, or live in a nation where slavery is allowed under law.

Humans are in perpetual bondage and some are in it from choice. Motivationally, one cannot reasonably or accurately frame the Civil War in terms of a desire by the Federal government to liberate black people from human bondage in the South. Slavery is not the burning moral issue that kills 600 thousand and lays a country to waste. The issue simply Lincoln ocupying the American State of Exception. And he occupies a different Presidency in a different time than Adams of the Alien and Sedition Acts who also had his State of Exception.

FACT: We do live in a corporatist, authoritarian state where corporations have been given personhood under this president whose State of Exception confers upon the executive the perogative of indefinite detention, suspension of habeus corpus, and suspension of posse comitatus.

Lincoln's Federal modernity pre-figures European fascism. Fascism is corporatism. The murder of Lincoln was for the creation of a CORPORATE UNITED STATES. The Absolute State arises with Lincoln fighting the Civil War. The Federal State apparatus now is the Exception. The men who administer the State, the bureaucrats, the experts have usurped sovereignity and negated democratic participation in decision making.

We committed no crimes, thus I have no shame or embarrassment. Why do you?

You've executed no projects and built no institutions either.

The mere fact that you content yourself with tedious and repetitive moralizing, handwaving, and whining about whitey not giving you your "karmic" due is enough ass-up, face-down pillow-biting to humiliate the average, non low-T heterosexual male of the species, period.

Again, why so much in love with Ron Paul?

lol, not in love with Ron Paul, just deeply disenchanted and increasingly contemptuous of punk-assed responsible negroes....,

Fact: one can appreciate history, the past, and its connection to the present.

Fact: you can repeat jigaboo and other such names ad infinitum and it builds no institutions and only elicits a chuckle.

Fact: only the most reductionist thinkers and piss poor social science wannabe dilettantes play around with single variable history and theory you have been recycling as of late.

This is fun. Again, you are really upset and burned that no one found your efforts in Michigan to their interest. That must have really hurt. Why is that? You are a thick skinned guy.

I think you should go all Marcus Garvey and start the Cnu bus line to compete with those 1 dollar Megabuses. We need more indigenous black economic institutions. I would most certainly throw in 10 bucks as a micro investor.

Fact: you can repeat jigaboo and other such names ad infinitum and it builds no institutions and only elicits a chuckle.

That's all you son.

But I see that "ass-up, face-down, pillow-biting" rhetoric got you excited, eh?

You ran out and put on the gimp suit hot-to-bottom without even being prompted?

Again, you are really upset and burned that no one found your efforts in Michigan to their interest. That must have really hurt. Why is that? You are a thick skinned guy.

lol,

Nah. It was a litmus test for courage and freedom. The "Free Black Man" in Lansing will do more with that than any dozen of you vocationally conflicted associate race studies teachers combined.

Fact: only the most reductionist thinkers and piss poor social science wannabe dilettantes play around with single variable history and theory you have been recycling as of late.

rotflmbao..., that shit right thurr would be hilarious coming from somebody with more analytical or attack vectors than "race studies".

In addition to the Hon.Bro.Preznit's counterfeiting of the Black brand for mimetic cover for his domestic State of Exception, he's also busily engaged in the conquest of Africa using France, Human Rights, Terrorism, and the National Endowment for Democracy - along with his own "racism" proof smiling visage.

Responsible negroes trot out high drama and dudgeon about debatable stuff from 150 years ago, but shamelessly carry water for or go pure moon-cricket chorus when it comes to atrocities being committed in the name of Black social and moral capital worldwide - even as we speak...,

@Cnu. More fun! You offered the image of me mid coitus. I think you got excited though. I imagine you as more of a bottom though, I would be nice and give you some Kool Aid to drink and even a reach around. I am polite like that.

But seriously, my "race" studies are critical. Inside joke. On occasion I can even do math. And no response to my observation that you don't know the history of slavery, its relationship to industrialization, or your piss poor reading of U.S. history? You disappoint me.

Why are you always claiming these phantom good works that you supposedly do in the "real world?" Is it ego gratification?

Frustration that you are not being acknowledged enough? I would imagine given your great works that community organizations and others have given your plaques, sashes, and nice awards. Is that not enough?

And no response to my observation that you don't know the history of slavery, its relationship to industrialization, or your piss poor reading of U.S. history? You disappoint me.

I've seen you trot out the fallacious appeals to authority many times taney, but then, never really quite bring any of those astonishing "priors" to bear in support of a single point you proposed to make.

Why are you always claiming these phantom good works that you supposedly do in the "real world?" Is it ego gratification?

Like with the "jiggaboo" you were desperate upthread to have me reprise, I ain't claim none here today.

But what the heck, anything to change the subject to something other than your indefensible, one-dimensional (and in this case) entirely erroneous racism-chasing.

You really have become accustomed to nothing other than an echo chamber, and, you really can't defend much of anything you profess from even the mildest disagreement.

Is your shit really that week dood?

Frustration that you are not being acknowledged enough? I would imagine given your great works that community organizations and others have given your plaques, sashes, and nice awards. Is that not enough?

lol, and there I thought Cobb was the GOAT when it came to squirting ink and jetting away from the scene of some of his more flamboyant rhetorical crimes....,

C'mon Steve-O - try to pay it forward just a little bit without pandering..., Prof. deVega not handing out stickers for brown nosing today - just red check marks for disagreeing with his tired syllabus.

@Cnu. You are in rare form today. What is going on? Intestinal upset? Y

ou are doing lots of projecting. I can defend and source my claims. As demonstrated here, on this matter, you cannot. That is fine. Feel free to recycle Ron Paul's mess if you like. But then, you have to own it.

We can't know everything. But, part of wisdom is knowing when your reach and grasp are not the same--clearly on matters of U.S. history you are outside of your weight class. Sorry. The cursory knowledge of these matters you have gleamed from cataloging articles and such is not a substitute for direct engagement with the texts.

Are things slow over at Cobbers so I am the beneficiary of your darts?

Entertaining. Good sport.

As I have said many times, you have your own project, I have mine. That is fine. You share information and do not offer much analysis. That is fine and needed. I learn a good deal from the information you share. You also seem to want to do good works to uplift the poor left behind types of the negro race. Good stuff too. However, you seem to be fixated on your approach as the only viable one. It doesn't work that way, sorry.

As we said before, you want allies to work with you on projects but you approach people with such a bilious tone at times. Who would want to collaborate?

I waded through dayyum near 1500 words of yours exhorting us to imagine that Ron Paul is a white supremacist, exhorting us to imagine the horrors of slavery 150 years ago, and exhorting us to reject libertarianism because of its failings on matters of race and justice - but I completely missed the "analysis" you purport to offer?

Aside from your exhortations to feel, imagine, and believe, where again was the scholarly analysis you have twice now warranted and represented as being beyond my knowledge, ability, and grasp?

Cause if it's past me, then that means it's totally beyond the capacity of 99.9999997% of the literate American populace.

Unless of course, what I'm missing is not factual or analytical data, "priors" as it were - but instead - I'm lacking the shared faith-based consensus that would make your "feel, imagine, and believe" altar call effective as a political suggestion?

From what I can gather thus far, only two indisputable facts have thus far been introduced into the discussion;

FACT: We do not now own slaves or seek to own slaves, or live in a nation where slavery is allowed under law.

FACT: We do live in a corporatist, authoritarian state where corporations have been given personhood under this president whose State of Exception confers upon the executive the perogative of indefinite detention, suspension of habeus corpus, and suspension of posse comitatus.

But I could be biased and therefore mistaken, so help me out if there are some hard facts I've missed wrt your contention that the congressman is first and foremost a white supremacist - and that me and mine are at greater risk of legal or bodily harm via his libertarian politics than we are from the Hon.Bro.Preznit's current American State of Exception?

As we said before, you want allies to work with you on projects but you approach people with such a bilious tone at times. Who would want to collaborate?

@Cnu. Yawn. I offered a claim that Ron Paul's arguments and misreadings of history enable a polite form of white racism in the present. You can accept or reject the argument.

You still have not rebutted, corrected, or intervened in my suggestion that you misread the history surrounding slavery.

You are quite a binary thinker at times. You do get that one can accept your critique--a bit of an overreach by the way--that Obama is an "authoritarian" and that other arguments are still valid?

The irony there is that your binary worldview if actually quite common to the authoritarian political personality, a type of politics which you are fixated on.

I have offered many times, please write up something and circulate it. You have your own site, instead of offering grand claims and theories in the comment section, why don't you do some original work and circulate it for public consumption?

Reposting citations is cool, but only gets you so far: it is like being a good cover band, pays well, is fun, but you won't get much respect in the long term.

I offered a claim that Ron Paul's arguments and misreadings of history enable a polite form of white racism in the present. You can accept or reject the argument.

I rejected it in my very first comment and presented further arguments in support of Paul's contentions about the civil war.

You still have not rebutted, corrected, or intervened in my suggestion that you misread the history surrounding slavery.

Pot meet kettle..., other than claiming that Paul is racist and I'm a one-dimensional supporter of Paul, I hardly think you've rebutted or corrected my alternative reading of the history surrounding the end of slavery.

You are quite a binary thinker at times.

You are a binary thinker at all times (racism-chasing) and have here-to-date demonstrated extremely heavy reliance upon appeals to obscure scholarly authority - specific examples of which you never subsequently manage to produce.

I have offered many times, please write up something and circulate it. You have your own site, instead of offering grand claims and theories in the comment section, why don't you do some original work and circulate it for public consumption?

lol, I'm in front of Interwebbed displays most hours of the day and night monitoring and querying logs, tweeking settings, and otherwise minding a vast herd of servers, workstations, and non-line-of-sight end-points. textual banter is a hobby enthusiasm, an avocational diversion, not a way of life.

My original work focuses on the economics of shared data services as a means of underwriting the costs of virtual learning - I am literally bound and determined to revolutionize STEM education and bring an end to 19th century style teaching, learning, and measurement. Has nothing whatsoever to do with this stuff, (aside from the fact that the good Bro. Feed has begun picking up on it as part of his nascent solutions formulation)

@Cnu "lol, I'm in front of Interwebbed displays most hours of the day and night monitoring and querying logs, tweeking settings, and otherwise minding a vast herd of servers, workstations, and non-line-of-sight end-points. textual banter is a hobby enthusiasm, an avocational diversion, not a way of life.

My original work focuses on the economics of shared data services as a means of underwriting the costs of virtual learning - I am literally bound and determined to revolutionize STEM education and bring an end to 19th century style teaching, learning, and measurement. Has nothing whatsoever to do with this stuff, (aside from the fact that the good Bro. Feed has begun picking up on it as part of his nascent solutions formulation)"

Why don't you write something about that given it is your terrain of expertise? If by your own admission this is a hobby, engage on those terms, but not in such a way as to lecture folks--me and most certainly many others--who know more about these matters than you do.

I respect your trade, all I ask is that you respect mine. You would not look kindly on someone demagoguing you as a mere technician and button pusher, but you routinely dismiss people with years of training and study as useless academics. And again, you wonder why the folks you want to reach out to in working on STEM programs are reluctant to help you.

For example, why would I put you in contact with folks who have millions in grant monies to work on these issues (which I could have easily done) if you have no respect for their trade craft? Why would I take time to help you develop a grant proposal or consult on an application to a nonprofit or the feds, if you think so little of those whose mission is not exactly the same as yours?

On research re: slavery start with this easy piece and then skip around:

You can also find their lectures online if that is your preferred venue.

Here is a basic start on Eli Whitney and the cotton gin. You want to support Paul's piss poor readings of history by trusting his interpretations, but have not done basic work. Thus, your claims on these matters are very weak.

http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/cotton-gin-patent/

Finally, you have access to databases at work, look up "industrial slavery" in the South or "compensated manumission" Not hard. Ta Coates has two good pieces with some solid links on the subject, check them out.

The truth is slavery has been around forever in all parts of the world. Some people are lazy and have a sense of entitlement. Its ok to be angry and it should make people angry. If there was no greed, racism, sexism, sadism, violence, or selfishness this world would be pretty closeto heaven.

Where in this whole and entire thread have I typed the words "cotton gin"?

What I wrote was The industrial revolution and replacement of comparatively inefficient human labor power with machinic power first from coal and then shortly thereafter from oil.

Here are the contextualizing political facts CDV - Northern populations were growing much more quickly than Southern populations, making it increasingly difficult for the South to influence the national government.

By the time of the 1860 election, the heavily agricultural southern states as a group had fewer Electoral College votes than the rapidly industrializing northern states.

Lincoln was able to win the 1860 Presidential election without even being on the ballot in ten Southern states.

This political calculus provided a very real basis for Southerners' worry about the relative political decline of their region due to the North growing much faster in terms of population and industrial output.

@Cnu. I read your claims about technology to be a fair reference to the surprise that came with the cotton gin. An obvious example.

2. The idea that slavery would have exhausted itself is not settled in the historiography. Do check the references I provided.

3. As a practical matter I would not hold my breath and delay "black freedom" for six months never mind decades for some hopes about demography to play out. And as we saw, assuming the projections held, you would still have millions of blacks in bondage. The South was not, under any circumstance, going to give up the number one capital good in the country.

yeah.., that one-dimensional thing is a pretty serious handicap dood - a veritable mind-killer that can have you imagining, feeling, and believing ENTIRELY WRONG things about the targets of your tirades - and - about your casual interlocutors.

Jim Powell's Greatest Emancipations is pretty much the libertarian go-to reference on this subject. Its primary value - imo - is its illumination of the consequences of Reconstruction. It can also directly and easily be seen as the backdrop to Paul's commentary on this issue, a commentary to which you have in typical fashion absurdly overreacted.

Summing up; I believe the experience of emancipation elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere suggests that without the U.S. Civil War, emancipation might have come a couple decades later than it did, but without the bigger backlash caused by the war, blacks would have gained their civil rights decades earlier than they did, long before 1960.

What we can say with a great deal of confidence is that the use of force and violence tends to backfire, and this happened with the U.S. Civil War. Many of those who supported the Civil War thought it might be a short cut for blacks to gain their civil rights, but the Civil War turned out to be the long way around.

As I hope I’ve shown, the alternative to the Civil War wasn’t to do nothing and wait for Southern slaveholders to decide when, if ever, they might emancipate their slaves. The alternative was to recognize that slavery was a gigantic beast, and no single strategy was likely to bring it down, so multiple strategies, including buying off slaveholders, had to be pursued – patiently, persistently, relentlessly, as Great Britain’s Royal Navy went after slave traders for six decades.

If by your own admission this is a hobby, engage on those terms, but not in such a way as to lecture folks--me and most certainly many others--who know more about these matters than you do.

rotflmbao...,

The primacy of your subjective access to your own qualia is beyond dispute. Whether those racism chasing feelings of yours map to anything objectively real, however, is very much open to casual public inspection. No need for access to the firewalled stacks of academic mummery.

I respect your trade, all I ask is that you respect mine. You would not look kindly on someone demagoguing you as a mere technician and button pusher, but you routinely dismiss people with years of training and study as useless academics. And again, you wonder why the folks you want to reach out to in working on STEM programs are reluctant to help you.

I think on this very thread it's been clearly demonstrated that your specific race-man biases render you effectively incapable of robust analysis - hell - you so busy putting words and motivations into an interlocutors mouth that you're incapable of even imagining alternative points of view - pretty much the sine qua non of solipsist one-dimensionality.

As for the rest, "ism" studies are mind-killers designed specifically for that purpose - I cannot respect them.

The academy is a bloated, pompous, de-evolutionary pile in desperate need of radical revision. Tenure and the slimy politics that that entails, along with endowment, have robbed higher-ed of its intellectual vigor and evolutionary potential.

In my field, on average - and in the very best schools - the academy tends to be about 5 years behind the curve of current state best practices - rendering what they teach students for all purposes useless in the real world.

The institutional interests you represent are in my estimation plainly degenerate. So rest assured, I'm not reaching out to you or anybody else within the status quo institutions for a dayyum thing. If I'm able to execute the plan I've orchestrated, I don't intend anything less than burning most of you down and putting you out on the streets.

500% tuition inflation and nothing to show for it!

ta loco?!?!

For example, why would I put you in contact with folks who have millions in grant monies to work on these issues (which I could have easily done) if you have no respect for their trade craft? Why would I take time to help you develop a grant proposal or consult on an application to a nonprofit or the feds, if you think so little of those whose mission is not exactly the same as yours?

rotflmbao...,

Responsible negroe puh-leeze....,

So I could be reduced to begging and looking to the big house for a hand up?

All-a-dat what you said, these are the same folks who have had forty years to get their shit together and they've done nothing but create a cluster fuck of historical proportions.

{The same type of folk who comprise the Broad Academy and its graduate economic hitmen whose only task, purpose, and mission in life is to hijack the dwindling property tax resource bases of urban public school systems and dole these monies out to selected crony vendors in the education vertical. Not only are they incompetent, they're plainly malfeasant and engaged in overt croney capitalism against the most vulnerable.}

Uh..., no thanks.

p.s. - I've authored successful grant proposals on my own for the benefit of the institutions for which I've volunteered. It's not rocket science.

I say this we affection. You are an odd fellow (you likely feel that way about me too). On one hand you complain that those 2nd 3rd line inheritor types don't want to help you with your projects, and then you malign them and name call. You like straw men. That is okay.

On libertarianism and Reconstruction I will let others hash that one out. My feelings about that ideology are clear. If you want to talk about that period you have to start with Foner, Franklin, and DuBois and go from there.

You like him so much, but in rejecting even doing basic research to which you have easy access you remind me of our friend Cobb.

Moving forward. Go save the world Cnu, without anyone else's help apparently. That is on you.

I lack your intellect -- I can't imagine I would ever be able to dig down and unpack everything implied in Ron Paul's positions on the Civil War, Civil Rights, and the way his positions relate to his version of "libertarianism." But it has been maddening to deal with my emotional response to this man and his political/social positions -- a response of deep revulsion and anger (though I realize much of that anger is due to the amount of approval this man draws from noted intellectuals on the Left) that is so overwhelming I'm left incapable of focusing my attention on analyzing it.

On one hand you complain that those 2nd 3rd line inheritor types don't want to help you with your projects, and then you malign them and name call. You like straw men. That is okay.

No.

Once again, you've heard what you're predisposed to hear - rather than what I've been writing.

My position with regard to the 2nd/3rd line inheritors is that they're corrupt, self-dealing, active impediments to improving the lot of "the least of these" in what remains of our geographically and demographically concentrated communities. It's taken me a long time to come around to this point of view, a point of view that I've seen spelled out nowhere more clearly and completely than by Bro. Feed who has been calling this out like Cassandra now for years.

I'm actually very relieved to discover that the brother is not off-base wrt his energetic, comprehensive, and continuous assessment - and that what has instead happened - is that he has been marginalized due to his hypergraphic and antagonistic style.

I understand why he has been so excited.

In retrospect, I must now confess to understanding what Bro. Steve Cokely was calling out about a certain class of black folks going waaaaay back in the day.

I now sincerely believe that the 2nd/3rd line "establishment" is - by its parasitic and dependent nature - intrinsically inimical to the interests of po black folk. Whether through incompetence or outright malfeasance, in my estimation, the former becomes indistiniguishable from the latter when it is repeated often enough and on a large enough scale.

What surprises me a little bit about you CDV - is that in your writings and your political points of view - you seem far less inclined to an objective search for historical, political, and operational truth, and far more predisposed to providing mimetic cover for certain folks, their values, their legacy, and their continuing activities.

But should I really be surprised when after all, your blog is called Respectable Negros?

You like him so much, but in rejecting even doing basic research to which you have easy access you remind me of our friend Cobb.

But that's just the point, he HAS done extensive research - very different and distinct from your own - as have I.

On the basis of the research he has done, Cobb has drawn distinctly different narrative, ideological, and political conclusions from your own.

Cobb's conclusions are markedly different from my own.

Frankly, Cobb is a native Angelino who for easily discernable reasons feels no communitarian or partisan allegiance to po black folks. His bottomline is simple, if you don't like a situation, either move away from it or be prepared to go to war to remedy it. Anything less than that is foolish conversation.

Considerede on a comparative basis, you react to questioning and/or challenge with far less circumspection and equanimity than does Cobb or even for that matter, most run-of-the-mill black conservatives I've encountered online.

Go save the world Cnu, without anyone else's help apparently. That is on you.

In all humility - you will never encounter a more effective and more stridently black partisan doer than me.

For all practical purposes, you could call it my "religion".

Here-to-date, I have found vastly more concrete support for genuine education reform from both the most elite and the most conservative quarters in my metropolitan community. They're essentially desperate to see something work. Based on what I've experienced in my iteractions with interested parties here-to-date - I suspect that the most enthusiastic political and material supporters of genuine public education reform will emanate from the most strenuously conservative political and ideological quarters.

@Cnu. You make me sad. Defending Cobb a man who uses video games as the basis of understanding some grand historical vision of European society. And enables John Birch conservatism. I expected better from you. And now with Constructive Feedback? Damn.

Good for you. I wish you well. We have different standards on these things is all--you can valorize travelers who have not done a tenth of the work to actually understand the historical, political, or cultural origins of what they speak on with "authority." I do not.

You give me way too much credit for being a cog in some type of grand scheme. I give cover to no one. I do my own thing. That I don't dance and carry on in the way that you like is what you dislike. There is also, as I said before, despite your words a type of anti-intellectualism at work in much of your argumentation. You have access to so much information but choose to ignore it. Then you cherry pick and prop up raggedy historiography from folks like Ron Paul.

There is a reason that some would dismiss you as a technocrat. I do not as I think you are bright but content to make great claims about your good works and to not actually do the work of analysis as opposed to creating a compendium. Lots of complaining on your part from the peanut gallery but not much writing or offering up ideas. Like I said I would love to see some original work from you.

That you don't want to work with others who share your goals if they do not support your mythos of super independent one man against an army super negroness that you have created online is unfortunate.

We have different standards on these things is all--you can valorize travelers who have not done a tenth of the work to actually understand the historical, political, or cultural origins of what they speak on with "authority." I do not.

Cobb's parents were among the architects of black cultural nationalism - his bona fides are sound. Not to mention, outside of factual statements CDV, we're talking about a highly subjective realm of experience, interpretation, and valuation.

You give me way too much credit for being a cog in some type of grand scheme. I give cover to no one. I do my own thing.

Go-along to get-along ain't that deep magne.

That I don't dance and carry on in the way that you like is what you dislike.

That you do not and will not critique 2nd/3rd line perpetrators and parasites, has gotten you EXACTLY the same type of criticism levelled at Cobb because he staunchly refuses to criticize or evaluate the knuckle-dragging and intractably racist 20%. Both you and he as subjects of said critiques - and your respective fanbase fellow-travelers - have responded in stereotypically identical manners.

There is also, as I said before, despite your words a type of anti-intellectualism at work in much of your argumentation.

There's no anti-intellectualism at work, you've simply been measured.

You have access to so much information but choose to ignore it. Then you cherry pick and prop up raggedy historiography from folks like Ron Paul.

Ron Paul is demonstrably exponentially less harmful, pernicious, and adversarial toward poor black folks than the responsible negroes who have pillaged and looted in their name for the past 40 years.

There is a reason that some would dismiss you as a technocrat.

Yeah, these 14EEE's are hard to conceal, but you know what they say about big feet...,

I do not as I think you are bright but content to make great claims about your good works and to not actually do the work of analysis as opposed to creating a compendium. Lots of complaining on your part from the peanut gallery but not much writing or offering up ideas. Like I said I would love to see some original work from you.

rotflmbao...,

I have in front of me a freshly signed contract (30 minutes ago) that will put special access library cards into the hands of 17,000 children as well as delivery of books and materials from the catalogs of 38 library systems across the greater metropolitan sprawl into their local school buildings, and live online tutorial assistance with school work/homework from 2-11pm 7 days a week.

This is the culmination of two years of painstaking personal effort, carefully and systematically engineering the reconciliation of a public library system and a public school district that have been acrimoniously divorced from one another now for 26 years.

Who do you suppose backed this effort from inception to completeion?

Cato conservative pillars of the establishment, or 2nd/3rd line constituent "services" responsible negroes?

That you don't want to work with others who share your goals if they do not support your mythos of super independent one man against an army super negroness that you have created online is unfortunate.

I gladly work with a myriad of others who not only share my goals, but who are actively engaged in the brick and mortar work of making substantial and useful changes to how education is delivered and done.

The sad truth of the matter is that there is more constructive and productive political, economic, and operational support to be gotten from the Koch Brothers and the John Birch Society conservatives in Kansas and Missouri for the real work that needs to be done to reform education nationwide - than there is from the entire national Jack and Jill Boule responsible negroe establishment, combined.

CNu clearly you have some strong talking points despite your you fragile and needy ego there is no question you stepped up bigtime in here.

The contract you mention in your comments sounds like another waste of money, time and more importantly an excercise divorced from what really can create measurable outcomes that will truly impact the targeted students you claim to care about but at least you have a tangible effort that cannot be dismissed.

Your claims that you are not getting anything from your endeavor is bullshit clearly you are seeking recognition to that end I have no problem giving you an attaboy pat on the head..

As a side note this was the best discourse I have observed on this site in quite some time as I noted earlier I wish Thrasher will return to juggle your cage but nevertheless I truly enjoyed the banter between you and the host ..It was hot and juicy..

I'm late to this party and don't want to get in the middle of the general argument, but on one claim that slavery would have ended without the Civil War because of the demographic and political shifts giving more power to the non-slave North: isn't that precisely WHY the South seceded from the North after the election of Abraham Lincoln? Because the political forces HAD shifted? Didn't the war start with South Carolina firing shots at Fort Sumter? The counter-factual involves the North letting the [White slave-owning aristocracy] South "go free" to run their own affairs. It does NOT involve some sort of natural political shift within the US as a whole in which the Southern aristocracy concedes defeat to the democratic forces of the rest of the country.

Congressman Paul's nonchalance in his racism and that quiet demeanor in couching his racism in "states' rights" arguments is one of the many reasons I get frustrated by supposed progressives & liberals supporting him.

To me, Congressman Paul is a very dangerous man and no should be allowed into the Oval Office, not even as a guest. Your evaluation of him and many more like him only reinforces my view.

Ron Paul's distortion of the historical record is appalling. South Carolina declared its independence in December, 1860--three months before Lincoln's inauguration. If anyone wishes to read that declaration, he/she will clearly see that the declaration was all about SLAVERY. To suggest anything else is a flat-out lie.

Mr. Paul seems to forget that South Carolina fired the first shots in the Civil War. The aggression didn't come from Lincoln and the North, as he suggests. Every schoolchild knows this, and it is amazing that he would try to paint the story differently.

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Who is Chauncey DeVega?

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